


Shattered Windows and the Sound of Drums

by skarlatha



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Zombies, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, M/M, Not A Happy Ending, You Have Been Warned
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-30
Updated: 2015-08-30
Packaged: 2018-04-18 01:05:57
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,853
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4686470
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skarlatha/pseuds/skarlatha
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Based on the Tumblr prompt that you see the world in black-and-white until you meet your soulmate, then everything bursts into vivid color all at once and stays that way for as long as your soulmate lives. Rick fell in love with Lori when they were in high school and lied to her that he saw color when he met her, and she’s believed him all this time. But during the latest failed session in months of marriage counseling, Rick feels the need to come clean.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Shattered Windows and the Sound of Drums

**Author's Note:**

> Seriously, I can’t stress this enough, there is not a happy ending to this fic. If you need a happy ending, this is not the fic for you.
> 
> Title from Coldplay’s “Viva la Vida.” Infinite thanks to TWDObsessive for beta-ing and for not friend-dumping me for being a monster.

“I just do so much for him,” Lori says, and Rick puts his head in his hands and tries to will himself not to groan. “And I don’t ask for much in return. Just… a compliment sometimes. A real discussion about things. But instead he just… just _stands_ there. Fixes himself a glass of tea, or goes outside to work on the lawnmower, or…” She shrugs, her shoulders sliding up and down and her eyes--hazel, it says on her driver’s license, although he’s heard Shane describe them as brown--big and intense, focused on the therapist sitting across the room from them.

Rick peers up at the therapist to gauge her reaction but says nothing. It’s exactly the opposite of what Lori wants from him and he knows it, but it’s easier to get her to forgive him for things he _doesn’t_ say than to deal with her holding grudges for years over the things he _does_. It’s a survival mechanism. It’s self-preservation. And it’s fucking _exhausting_.

“Alright,” the therapist says. “Let’s be more specific. Give me an example of something you have done since our last appointment that you think Rick should have handled differently.”

Rick suppresses a scoff and instead lets his eyes run over the framed diplomas and artwork on the walls, items he’s stared at for so many months during sessions like this that he could probably reproduce them from memory. _Dr. Susan Jenssen, Ph.D. in Psychology_ , with carefully calligraphied swoops and swirls around her name and the seal of a prestigious university. A painting of flowers that Rick can’t tell apart, shades of gray on a slightly lighter gray background. And Susan herself, thin and wrinkled but pleasant, aggressively neutral, friendlier than she must be on the inside. It’s all just a setup, though. Lori has the upper hand here. She always has.

“Last week… well, there’s a bit of background. May I?” Lori asks politely, pushing her thick, silky hair behind her ear. Susan nods graciously as if granting a boon, and Lori continues. “Rick says all the time that he prefers redheads,” she tells the therapist.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Rick mutters under his breath, wiping his hand across his mouth and leaning forward to put his elbows on his knees.

“Rick, do you have something to say about that?” Susan asks, her voice maddeningly even.

“Yeah,” he says, sitting up and widening his eyes even as he has them locked on the black carpet. “I told her that I liked redheads _once_. Twelve years ago.” He looks up, meets Susan’s gray eyes. “Once,” he repeats for emphasis. “ _Twelve years ago_.” He hears Lori’s dainty little snort beside him and he whips his head over to stare her down. “And it wasn’t even--”

“You’ve said it _many_ times since then,” Lori argues. “Please don’t lie to the therapist, Rick. We’re here to work things out, not bury the issues under more lies.”

“I’m not lying,” Rick says, gritting his teeth to keep his voice calm. “I’m not. I don’t care that much about hair color, Lori. So even if I _was_ into redheads in general, it doesn’t have any bearing on whether or not I want _you_.”

“Well, that’s the damn truth, at least,” Lori grumbles, and Rick raises an eyebrow.

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” he snaps.

“Nothing.”

“Don’t lie to the therapist, Lori,” he says, feeling his eyes glaze over with anger just slightly. He knows he’s being a dick, knows he should keep his temper, and God knows he’s tried until now. He’s tried for months, _years_ , and today he just can’t anymore. He reaches inside himself and he finds nothing more to give, not when it’s so goddamn _pointless_ , not when she never hears him when he speaks anyway.

He wonders, not for the first time, who _should_ be sitting here beside Lori, if seeing her in vivid technicolor would make a difference. Somewhere out there is a man who sees color but doesn’t have his lover because she’s too busy fighting with Rick on a therapist’s couch, because he’d been too young and stupid to think his actions through on the night he met her.

But that’s all done now. He can’t change it. He can’t take back eighteen years of marriage and crash it to the ground, not when they have a kid to think about. So even though he can’t hold his temper very well _today_ , well… he knows he’ll have to get it back for the future. For the rest of his life. Because that’s what soulmates are supposed to be: forever. There is no divorce. No separation. Only forever. And he’s put all his lies and all his truths in this one basket and so he has to deal with it. There can never be anybody for Rick but Lori, not now. Not when he’s lied to her for this long. He has to make it through this session and then find time to regroup.

But _fuck_ , her voice is getting to him today.

“I’m not lying,” she says. “I remember at _least_ two other times--”

“ _Jesus_ ,” Rick murmurs, putting his head back in his hands and massaging his temples.

“--and stop with the profanity, Richard. It’s not helping. It never helps.”

Susan’s voice then, calm and measured. “Let’s take a step back--”

“He doesn’t look at me!” Lori says, her voice loud and shrill in the small room. “He doesn’t even see me. He just… he doesn’t _notice_.”

“Specifics,” Susan reminds her. “We learn from specifics, remember?”

“Fine,” Lori says, and Rick hears her fold her arms over her chest. “Rick prefers redheads. So last week, I dyed my hair for him.”

Rick’s throat seizes up, adrenaline hammering through his veins. He stays leaned forward, keeps his head in his hands, hopes that he can ride this out--

“Rick, what do you have to say about that?” Susan asks calmly.

He sits up slowly, turning his eyes over to Lori, letting his eyes trail over the black hair against the white skin. “I didn’t notice,” he says, hoping that general male obliviousness will carry him through this yet again. Because even if he has nothing else to give for Lori… Carl. He has to think of Carl. Has to stay with Lori for _Carl_. No divorce. No separation. Only forever.

He loved her once, he thinks with a panic. Surely he can do it again. Surely he can--

“Rick?” Susan asks again. “Tell Lori what you think of her hair.”

Rick reaches out and touches it, lets the strands run through his fingers. “You know I love your hair,” he says softly, only loud enough for Lori to hear. “It’s soft. Beautiful.”

“Do you like it better this way?” Lori asks, equally softly, her eyes meeting Rick’s with something that almost resembles affection.

“I love it,” Rick says, smiling and hoping it reaches his own eyes. Blue ones, he’s been told. He cards his fingers through her long hair again and decides to hedge his bets, just in case this is some sort of trap to make him admit he prefers redheads. “But I loved it brown, too.”

Her smile freezes on her face and Rick hears a sharp intake of breath from Susan. He stills his fingers in her hair just moments before she grabs his wrist and yanks it away from her, releasing it like it’s a rattlesnake poised to strike her.

“What?” Rick asks, but he knows what’s coming. He’s always known this would happen, since the very moment she walked up to him at the dance, after they saw each other across a crowded room and her face lit up like a fireworks display, eyes sparkling and breath coming fast. _It’s you_ , she’d breathed, reaching up to run her hand down his cheek. _You’re him. You’re mine_. And god, she was so beautiful, monochrome as she was, and he’d been seventeen so instead of telling the truth, he’d smiled back and kissed her, whispering words against her mouth that he’d never been able to take back: _I never knew color could be so lovely_.

“Get out,” Lori hisses.

“Lori--” he starts, but she stands up and towers over him.

“Get _out_ ,” she says again, her voice edged with fury.

“We can talk about--”

“My hair _is_ brown, Richard,” she yells, grabbing a hunk of it and shaking it at him. “After you didn’t say anything about me dyeing it, I fucking _dyed it back_. It’s _brown_ , you son of a bitch.”

“Lori,” he says again, but she doesn’t cut him off this time, just stares at him and waits for him to continue. Only he can’t, because there’s nothing to say. “I didn’t mean to hurt you,” he says at last, because at least that much is true. It’s no comfort at all and it does nothing to remove the past eighteen years of lies and betrayal, but it’s all he has to offer her. “I loved you. We were so young and I loved you and… I didn’t want to lose you. So I just let you believe--”

“You didn’t _let_ me do anything,” she says, hands quivering with rage at her sides. “You actively lied to me. You… there’s a man out there who I should have been with. Someone I must have seen at the same time I saw you. And he’s out there _alone_ , without me, while I’ve been _wasting my life_ in this office trying to make things work with you because I thought you were my _soulmate_.”

“I’m--”

“I don’t want to hear it.” She grabs for her purse, her voice cracking on the words she speaks. “I want you _gone_ by tomorrow morning. I’ll get Carl and we’ll go to my mother’s and when I get back home in the morning, I don’t ever want to see your fucking face _ever again_ \--”

“Lori--”

“ _Ever again_ , do you hear me?” she yells, and she spins on her heel and storms out of the room.

For a moment, Rick sits motionless on the sofa, but as he hears a loud sob from the lobby and the slam of a door, he jumps to his feet. She’s hysterical, and she can’t drive like this. She’ll get herself killed. She’ll pick Carl up from school and then she’ll get them _both_ killed.

He leaps to his feet and follows her, getting out into the parking lot just in time to see the white SUV peel out into the street. He grabs his keys from his pocket and heads for the patrol car, thankful that they’d at least driven separately so he can go after her.

He flips on the sirens and follows her, pushing aside his guilt at misusing police resources with the rationale that it’s his duty as an officer to stop someone from driving recklessly and putting themselves in danger. Lori ignores him, just speeding up and racing down the residential streets near the hospital, heading for the main road that will take her to Carl’s middle school. Rick tightens one hand on the steering wheel and pulls out his phone with the other, frantically swiping until he finds her number and pressing _call_ over and over and over as she disconnects every time.

Finally, as the SUV pulls out onto the main road, Rick presses the button to call Shane instead. “Send backup,” he barks as soon as his friend answers. “Lori’s on her way to Carl’s school and she’s driving like a maniac. I can’t get her to pull over.”

“Shit, man, what did you do?” Shane asks, but Rick can hear the slamming of a car door and the start of an engine, and he’s just grateful that Shane had been so close to his own vehicle.

“We’ll talk later, just… hurry,” Rick says.

He hangs up the phone and tosses it into the passenger seat just as he hears the sound of a motorcycle, followed immediately by a heart-stopping screech of brakes. Lori’s SUV swerves, running up on a curb, and Rick watches in horror as the wheels crunch over the front tire of a beat-up Triumph motorcycle.

And its driver.

He only vaguely remembers putting the patrol car in park, only distantly registers Lori getting out of her own vehicle, screaming at the top of her lungs. All he can think about is getting to the driver, pulling him free of the mangled remains of his bike, keeping him still until an ambulance arrives. He grabs his walkie and yells instructions into it as he sprints over to the scene, boots crunching over metal and glass and the blood already running down the grooves of the concrete.

The driver is still moving, struggling weakly to pull off his own helmet, and Rick kneels beside him.

“Shh, don’t move,” he murmurs. “I’ll help you. They’re sending an ambulance.”

“Get it off,” the biker wheezes softly, coughing at the end of his sentence and tugging with trembling fingers at his helmet.

“I can’t,” Rick tells the man. He puts a hand on his chest lightly, soothingly. “If your neck is fractured, it could--”

“Get it _off_ ,” the man insists, more loudly, struggling harder. “Can’t breathe. Can’t--”

“Okay,” Rick says. “Okay, be still, I’ll get it off.” It’s not standard procedure and he knows it, but frankly the risk of leaving the helmet on and having the man struggle himself into paralysis is almost as high as the risk of spinal injury if he _does_ remove it, so Rick puts his hands on the helmet and gently works it off of the man’s head.

“Thank you,” the man wheezes, and Rick looks into his eyes for the first time and the world grinds to a halt.

He’d always wondered how color would first appear. People described it differently--some said it was a gradual leaching-in of vibrance, starting from the eyes of the other person and bleeding out into the world. Some said it was instant, no-color to full-color, all in the blink of an eye. Some said it came with an audible sound almost like a sonic boom, everything exploding into life all around them.

For Rick, it comes with a sickening punch to his gut, as his mind registers one particular color, one that he already knows the name for because he’s seen it at the scene of hundreds of accidents. Eye color and hair color and skin color vary from person to person, but one thing is constant, a commonality that could never be ambiguous.

And the first color Rick sees is _red_.

Seeping out from the corner of the man’s mouth, pouring from a wound on his head where the helmet had cracked and cut into his flesh. One drop pooling in the corner of his nose and then slowly trickling down the man’s cheek.

“What--” the man whispers, his eyes locked on Rick’s, but his words are cut off by another cough, another gasp, a convulsion of pain that runs through his body.

“No,” Rick says. He puts his hand on the man’s cheek, his thumb smearing through the red, red, crimson, scarlet, _red_ blood there. “No,” he says again, swallowing to keep his voice from cracking. “Don’t talk. An ambulance is on the way. You’re going to be okay.”

The man tries feebly to shake his head, then lifts his hand to Rick’s face, tapping at the crease at the corner of Rick’s eye with so much futile effort that it makes Rick want to be sick. “What color?”

“Blue,” Rick says. “They’re blue.”

The man smiles just the slightest amount, letting his hand fall back to the hot pavement. “Blue,” he repeats, more breath than speech. His eyes slowly slide shut, but the smile doesn’t waver. “Mine too.”

“ _No_ ,” Rick yells, gathering the man up in his arms and shaking him hysterically. “No, stay with me. The ambulance is coming. The ambulance is coming. Stay with me. Stay with me.” He hugs the man tightly to his chest, pushing his fingers into the blood-soaked hair at the base of the man’s skull. “Stay with me,” he repeats, softer this time, looking at the sky and seeing blue, looking at the ground and seeing red, looking at the pavement and seeing gray for the first true time in his life.

“Rick?” It’s Lori’s voice, high-pitched and panicked, and Rick just clutches the man harder and keeps whispering _stay with me_ into his ear. “Is he okay?”

“He’s gonna be fine,” Rick chokes out. “The ambulance is coming. The ambulance is coming. Stay with me.” He shakes the man again, his fingers pressing into his skin like the sheer force will keep the man with him. “Stay with me.”

“Rick, let go,” Lori says, pushing the words out through sobs. “You have to let go. He’s gone.”

Rick shakes his head hard. “He’s _not_ gone. He’s… he’s still with me. I can still see color. He’s still alive. I can still see…”

Red and blue and gray and red and blue and gray and--

gray.

**Author's Note:**

> Follow me on [Tumblr](http://http://skarlatha.tumblr.com/)!


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